Throwing hammers, poles and rocks, the Highland games were all about fun Sunday afternoon during the Tenth Annual St. Andrews Society of Northwest Michigan's Picnic and Family Highland Games.
Held at the Almira Township Park, the event drew 35 attendees to immerse themselves in Scottish culture and games. A potluck, raffle, visiting and bagpipe music rounded out the three-hour gathering, which drew members from Cadillac, Traverse City, Lake Ann, Old Mission and Leelanau County.
Although the caber, or long pole, broke in half on the first toss, that merely provided participants with more opportunities to try their hand at the ancient competition.
"It's really more balance than anything," noted Jamie Rich of Bear Lake, trying his hand at caber throwing for the first time. "They look ungainly but they're not."
Founded nine years ago with a mission to preserve and celebrate Scottish culture, the society holds regular meetings and other special events in the region. They have previously hosted an evening commemorating poet Robert Burns and also participated in Heritage Parades during the National Cherry Festival.
A small but loyal core group keeps the society going and they hope that public events such as the picnic and Highland Games will spark more interest.
"This is one of our points: to try and get the younger generation involved and interested, the little ones and teenagers," said Margaret Sarna of Troy and Traverse City, who helped found the society.
Sarna puts out the society's newsletter and she and her husband, Don, come up for most events. Her parents came to America from Scotland as adults and she grew up closely connected to her Scottish roots. However, she sees that many people of Scottish descent have lost a connection to or interest in, their heritage, with immigrants crossing the Atlantic generations ago.
"The older [immigrants] are dying off now and new ones are not coming over, they have it too comfortable over there," noted Sarna, who has visited her parent's homeland three times. "There's not large influx anymore."
Providing a sampling of the target audience, Heather Johnson-Raymer brought her two children, Emma, 7 and James, 4. Her mother, Terilee Johnson, also attended and both described their quest to trace family roots through Johnson's parents. Johnson had been researching her genealogy for a few years but was stopped by her lack of computer savvy.
The family's experience illustrates the fact that genealogical research is characterized by hours of meticulous research occasionally highlighted by breakthroughs. Johnson-Raymer stepped in and found a gold mine on a previously unknown, distant relative's website who had listed information both back hundreds of years and forward to Johnson-Raymer's generation.
"I stumbled on a web site on the Hawkins side and they had traced it to the point where they arrived 15 generations ago," said Johnson-Raymer, who lives with her family on a cherry farm on Old Mission Peninsula. "I was in tears, I called my mom and she was in tears and we called my grandma."